Look familiar?

Bowl's a trick-or-treat bonanza for retro candies' fervent fans

When Joyce Larrivee, now 54, was growing up in the Chicago suburbs, a bar of Bonomo's Turkish Taffy was just about the greatest experience a kid could have for a nickel.

She liked vanilla and chocolate. Her older brother wanted strawberry. They walked to the dime store with change in their pockets and ran home as fast as they could, hoping not to be waylaid by friends who might expect them to share.

"Our allowance was a quarter, so you could buy five," Larrivee recalled.

Decades passed, but the memory of cracking the taffy bars into sweet-tasting shards that lasted as long as a kid could hope for stayed with Larrivee. She searched online but never found anything that came close.

Then, a few weeks ago, something caught her attention at a Cracker Barrel store in New Port Richey, Fla., where Larrivee moved with her husband eight years ago. "I turned the corner and saw Bonomo's Turkish Taffy in banana."

Larrivee peered at the label, found a Web site and was on the phone with Kenny Wiesen in Long Island the next day. Where could she find the taffy in vanilla and chocolate?

Until a few months ago, the answer was nowhere. Bonomo's Turkish Taffy had been out of production for decades.

But Wiesen's childhood memories also were wrapped in taffy.

"I was one of those people out there who looked for Bonomo's Turkish Taffy," said Wiesen, 53, who grew up visiting candy stores with his grandmother in Brooklyn. "It was something from my youth."

Wiesen, an attorney, started his own search. Online, he discovered that a lot of other people were looking for it too. He tracked the candy's course from its introduction by the Bonomo family in Coney Island in the 1940s to its eventual sale to Tootsie Roll Industries in the 1970s, where the recipe was changed to a softer version, Wiesen said, that sent fans of the original into mourning. Wiesen decided to bring it back.

Wiesen's taffy quest stretched into an eight-year taffy odyssey. There were sticky trademark battles, jaw-aching manufacturing hurdles and years of chewy experimentation. Then in May, at the National Confectioners Association annual expo in Chicago, Wiesen, who'd contracted with the Pennsylvania-based Warrell Corp., relaunched Bonomo's Turkish Taffy upon a pining world.

The news spread like a sugar rush. "It became the hit and the discussion of the entire show," Wiesen said. The first boxes began making their way to candy shops throughout the country on July 1.

Terese McDonald, who owns two Chicago candy shops, doubled her order after seeing the reaction.

"People are going crazy," she said. "People spend years looking for their childhood candy."

McDonald's Candyality stores also do a sweet business in candy cigarettes, Zagnut and Clark bars, Bun Bars and a cherry nougat confection popular in the 1940s known as Cherry Mash.

"It's like a part of their childhood that they grab a taste of," she said.

McDonald, 50, didn't get into the candy business with any particular focus on nostalgia. Then she read "Candyfreak," Boston writer Steve Almond's nostalgic account of candy obsession, and decided that part of her mission would be to seek out and carry hard-to-find candy.

Now she says, as many as a third of her customers come in seeking candy from another era.

It doesn't always end in a PayDay. McDonald says she regularly has to disappoint customers looking for Marathon bars and Chum Gum. The discontinued candies are high on the list of candy seekers' unrequited longings.

Susan Whiteside, vice president of communications for the National Confectioners Association in Washington, D.C., says the industry doesn't break out sales for nostalgic candy. There's no clear category. "At least 60 percent of the candies on the market today are 50 years or older," Whiteside said.

But "for at least the past decade the interest in retro candy has been pretty intense" — as baby boomers look to rediscover the things that made them happy in their youth, she said.

Beth Kimmerle, a native of Evanston who began her career in product development for Fannie May, has written four books on candy history. Kimmerle, who also lectures and consults on candy topics, is regularly approached by people who want help in finding or bringing back a candy from their childhood.

Fans of the 1970s-era braided and chocolate-covered caramel rope known as the Marathon bar have had an especially hard time letting go, Kimmerle says, despite a Cadbury product, the Curly Wurly, that is marketed as its replacement. Nostalgia is rarely satisfied by substitution, Kimmerle notes, even when the original wasn't necessarily a masterpiece.

"People get really serious about seeking out these brands that they knew and loved because it's a way to go back," she said. Not long ago, Kimmerle said she was asked to help start a campaign to bring back the Marathon bar, discontinued by Mars Inc. in 1981.

"I remember the bar," said Kimmerle. "It always tasted a little bit like the wrapper."